The Only Way, Doctor Who: Face the Raven, Reviews, 22/11/2015

I’m glad this episode was as good as it is. From the top,

SPOILERS

because Face the Raven will go down as the best companion death episode that’s ever been done in Doctor Who. Though I’ll be the first to admit that this was about the right time for Clara to go, the actual death of a companion is some serious business. 

Steven Moffat often talks about how important it is that
Doctor Who not become stuck repeating its past. It has
to try new things to survive. So I'm glad Clara's death
comes when it does. It's the departure of a regular cast
member that, while superbly effective, isn't treated
with the bombastic context of a season finale.

This is death. Not stuck in a parallel dimension, not memory-wiped, not a one-off-who-only-ends-up-on-companion-lists-because-her-character-was-prominent-in-the-episode’s-publicity (twice). Not stuck behind a timey-wimey piece of paradox technobabble. Clara Oswald is dead.

But it made for legendary Doctor Who.I mean, we’re not dealing with Adric here. 

Let’s contrast the case. Adric’s death was a needless ploy in a story that would probably have had him leaving the TARDIS anyway to return to his home dimension. 

Instead, his death became the perfect symbol of how wasted he was on the show. A decent, if over-earnest, young student-style companion to Tom Baker, he had no place in the Classic Season 19 TARDIS crew. With Tom, Adric was half of a double-act, the companion that would mess up and get into trouble.

Adric was always that type of character: he was smart enough to think he knew how to fix a problem, but not smart enough to figure out the right thing to do. Fine when you’re the only companion. 

But Classic Season 19 introduced a less domineering Doctor in Peter Davison, the adventurous and stumbling Tegan, and the more assured scientist Nyssa. The two new companions had a brilliant dynamic together since Castrovalva. Adric had no place left. He was just flailing around on the TARDIS.

So while Adric had to leave the show, there was nothing particularly compelling about how he left. He was a companion whose potential on the show ran out of steam when there was plenty left to explore in the rest of the crew. So Adric had to leave, but he didn’t have to die.

It was an event – let’s kill a long-running companion for the first time ever – but without a reason. The death of a companion in Doctor Who is serious enough, both in its rarity and its power in the show, that it becomes a major event. 

While my main argument in this post is that Clara didn't
have the potential in her character to stay on Doctor
Who anymore, at least her death was properly tragic.
Adric's death is, in contrast, celebrated among Doctor
Who fandom as something we love to watch happen
to one of the most annoying characters in the show's
history. Kind of undercuts the event's drama.

And that major event was for a character who was such a damp squib as Adric? Trying to generate powerful drama without any attempt at establishing it over the long term. Mistaking a vague sketch of the dramatic for the real thing.

But let’s leave aside John Nathan-Turner’s narrative aesthetics. What can this teach us about Clara?

Her death was powerful. A beautiful and affecting moment. The direction certainly helped, with understated music playing over her otherwise silent scream. Her final speech to the Doctor was also moving, and cut straight to the heart of their relationship.

She was the voice of conscience that saves the Doctor from being a true genocidal killer.* An opposition to cynicism is probably the ethical stance that Doctor Who most consistently makes, and it’s at the heart of the show.

* And Doctor Who from revolving around an aching abyss of moral contradiction, the hero who murdered billions of innocents.

The Doctor is a character who, as he’s developed, has become someone dedicated to finding a better resolution to intractable conflict. “There’s always a better way.” That’s exactly what The Zygon Inver(s)ion was all about a couple of weeks ago.

The one terrifying moment where this broke down was the Time War, which was overwritten when Clara Oswald appeared in its climactic moment. The Doctor today is a harsh and intense character, especially as he’s developed under Peter Capaldi. Such a character can easily succumb to cynicism, the damnation of everyone because of their situation.

Conscience is the voice of calm, the engine of sympathy. It’s why the Doctor, after Clara’s last instructions, tells Ashildir to hide from him, so as not to risk his anger. But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

Clara had to leave Doctor Who because she had run out of
potential, a curious concept. See, Doctor Who thrives by
doing something new, building on what had gone before
to change completely. Its successes are lessons that let
you make new mistakes later. The driving concept
of Ashildir's character illustrates this principle.

Conscience is the foundation of ethical behaviour, our inner motive not to give into to the worst solution for the world. It’s the kick of energy that makes us care for those who suffer. Clara’s role in The Day of the Doctor put this aspect of her character at the forefront.

So it’s narratively fitting that her death would call back to this central part of her character, which was so important to the most important episode of modern Doctor Who.** It’s also fitting that Ashildir, whose current villainous nature is the result of the Doctor’s misplaced conscience, is responsible for Clara’s death.

** The second most important episode being The Time of the Doctor, for kicking away this moronic continuity of the 12-regenerations limit that was holding Doctor Who’s future hostage.

Getting ahead of myself again.

She also mentioned Danny Pink, whose own death (all three of them) were essential to the climax of Clara’s most important narrative arc on the show.

I originally wrote in my posts on Death in Heaven that this was Clara’s perfect departure, her and the Doctor’s tragic moments of personal loss. But since Jenna Coleman returned to Doctor Who, they needed another year out of the character.

The problem is that when you have a storyline as brilliant as Clara and Danny’s relationship over the last season, it’s damn tough to top. It’s no surprise that they couldn’t find something else as powerful. 

So Clara found herself being written out of her own show. Little by little, she had less and less to do this season. A substantial lead role in The Magician’s Apprentice became the Master’s stooge in The Witch’s Familiar. 

Ashildir is immortal, and The Woman Who Lived sees
her compare herself to the Doctor, as a fellow
immortal. But the Doctor is an immortal who can
change, each regeneration remixing his personality in
a new way each time. Ashildir is an immortal who
remains constantly the same.

Under the Lake / Before the Flood was a pretty ordinary story with an ordinary role for her. And her role was big enough in The Girl Who Died as in most episodes with a strong guest character. 

But then The Woman Who Lived was a solo Doctor adventure, with a single appearance from Clara. The Zygon Inva(er)sion saw Clara totally sidelined in favour of Bonnie. Jenna Coleman gave her best performance of the year, apart from this week’s, as Bonnie. It was another sign that the character was through. Coleman’s performance was most interesting when she was playing another character.

Her story arc this year was especially thin. All they really had for Clara this year was that she was growing especially reckless. Without Danny, she really didn’t have a home to go back to – and we never see any of her home, family, or Coal Hill School this season. 

So her joy at the wonders of the universe becomes a mad adventurousness, thrill-seeking, risk-taking. Compare it to her love story with Danny and its conflict of Clara’s love of travelling with Danny’s joy in building a community and life.

Clara’s thin development this season finally gave in to the initial complaint about her character, that she was a stereotypical generic competent companion. This complaint was based in a perceptual mistake of the audience that believed it. 

Her first season’s story arc, the mystery of the multiple Clara’s, was a red herring to trick the audience out of seeing her real story. Clara’s first season was the story of a woman with a conscience powerful enough that she’d give herself up to save someone she cared about. 

Clara is a young woman with an incredible sense of joy at the beauty of the universe, but who also had this deep ethical core. The same Clara who risked sacrificing herself to save the Doctor and the universe in Night of the Doctor is the same one who did sacrifice herself to save her friend Rigsy in Face the Raven.

Each time we see Ashildir, she becomes less interesting.
In The Girl Who Died, she's remarkably creative enough
to merit the Doctor saving her, and to become the hero
of the story. By Face the Raven, she's become another
typical Doctor Who petty tyrant with a chip on her
shoulder. In never changing, she becomes
progressively less than what she had been.

All this makes for a truly satisfying end to her character in Doctor Who. Her recklessness gets the better of her, but it does so thanks to her conscience, to protect her friend. She calls back to Danny, the love of her life. 

Even the TARDIS memorial Rigsy makes for Clara is a touching callback to the original arc of the TARDIS’ initial distaste for her.

And she reminds her best friend, the Doctor, never to forget his conscience, even when her death will make him very much want to. So Ashildir gets the most appropriate ending for her arc as well.

Ashildir gets told, essentially. Her scheme to steal the TARDIS key for a mysterious third party*** is an attempt to punch above her weight as a villain. She becomes a villain capable of luring the Doctor into an iron-clad trap, a control of Doctor Who’s narrative that only the greatest villains can achieve.

*** Who’ll be the main villains of the finale, Hell Bent, in the conclusion to another brilliant three-part story. They’re rare in modern Doctor Who, but when they have a solid structure and purpose, they work brilliantly.

Because other than that, Ashildir is basically just another petty tyrant with a wild concept behind her. She runs the refugee street as a tyrant, ruthless in her enforcement of brutal rules. It’s the paradigm concept of villainy in Doctor Who, but she's just another example. Depressingly ordinary. She shouldn't be given the narrative weight of forcing terrible violence from our hero in a quest for revenge.****

**** Another wonderful meta-fictional aspect of Clara's death. She makes the Doctor promise not to make her death the motive of an anti-heroic revenge narrative. Essentially, she promises the Doctor not to put her in a fridge.

But her key concept makes her a fitting parallel to Clara’s perfect narrative culmination. Ashildir is an immortal who sheds her memories, becoming dissociated from them as they’ve become stories in her notebooks instead of visceral experiences. 

All her lasting associations and friendships disappear into a past she doesn’t even remember. Ashildir has truly become Me, a pure indexical, a presence and personality without her own lived narrative. 

Rigsy, meanwhile, is the perfect character to spur Clara's
death-by-conscience. The entire meta-fictional joke of
her first season's storyline was that underneath this
elaborate sci-fi problem, Clara was always an
ordinary person who stepped up to become a hero
when it was needed. She died doing the same for
another ordinary person who had become a hero
helping defeat the Boneless in Flatline, Rigsy.

Her choice of a Janus woman as supposed victim is appropriate in this sense. These aliens can telepathically perceive the complete narrative of everyone they meet. No one has any secrets from them, and they perceive everyone around them completely.

No wonder the Janus disguised her daughter as a non-telepathic male. Female Januses must be the most hated creatures in the universe. But she’d also be a call of conscience for Me, able to recall her entire narrative for her. 

Because when you know the whole of someone’s narrative, you understand how they became the way the are. That knowledge makes it impossible to hate anyone.

I don’t know if we’ll get to explore that potential for Ashildir / Me, since Maisie Williams’ time on Doctor Who seems to be finished. As is Jenna Coleman’s, though her potential as a character has been thoroughly explored. 

Yes, I always liked her character. Especially her interaction with Capaldi, and her pivotal role in Day of the Doctor. Face the Raven wasn’t the perfect ending to her character’s time on the show. That would have been if Death in Heaven had been her last episode. Her largely superfluous role this season is a sign that her character stuck around a season too long.

But as an end to one of the longest, deepest, and most complex companion narratives in the history of Doctor Who, it was fantastic.

We’ll always have the DVDs.

The Real and the Most Real, You Were My Friend, 31/10/2014

A brief post today, a further elaboration on some of the ideas in You Were My Friend (for which tickets are available). It’s relatively spoiler-free, but even these spoilers won’t really be such, because all I’m going to describe of them is that they exist, not precisely how or why the scenes shift as they do. 

Throughout, You Were My Friend is what I’d call a social realist piece of theatre. I mean it’s social realist in the sense that I learned about it from Phil Sandifer, after whose lesson on the landmark BBC tv-movie Cathy Come Home, I realized applied to a lot of my favourite old movies: Five Easy Pieces, MASH, The Passenger. My own production is deeply political, and finds its profundity in the small scales. It’s about two women living in an apartment overlooking Kensington. All scenes but one take place in that single apartment. 

The pressures that drive them throughout the narrative are utterly ordinary, and exactly what drives most of us to distraction. They have hostile or passive-aggressive relationships with their families. They experience crises of confidence as their careers face roadblocks or stall out completely. They undergo the pressure of having to pay the same or rising bills at a time when they have less and less money. 

That’s what social realism is about. In Phil’s words from his Cathy Come Home post in 2011, “The point of social realism is simple. It’s out and out politicized art. You do social realism because you want to get people to change something about the way they live their lives.” Social realist storytelling conventions let us experience a person’s life in such a more intense way than we usually do, because it’s packed into, in the case of You Were My Friend, only about 80 minutes.

That intensity of a sympathetic example of someone whose life circumstances are very different from yours can achieve the political purpose of helping you understand such a person better than you otherwise could. Some reactions to learning that a person is stuck in a crap job is, “Well, they should get a better job!” But that idea doesn’t take seriously the idea that you can’t.

As well, when a person is lulled into an attitude of accepting a realistic portrayal of life on stage, seeing that shift into a hyper-real mode is especially jarring, unsettling. This is what we spent a lot of time on during the technical rehearsal tonight: getting the transition from the social realist mode of lighting and on-stage movement to a more meta-fictional dreamscape that directly involves the audience in the characters’ existences. It’s a step beyond the social realism that encourages sympathy, and into a mode of theatrical storytelling that actually takes the audience directly into the experience of the characters. 

Catch the Conscience of the Doctor, Jamming, 23/11/2013

I think I’m going to use my weekend posts to discuss my ideas that I’m working on in relation to fiction. Maybe it’ll be pure story brainstorming drivel, maybe an interesting character or idea, maybe an exercise like the last few weeks of my Assignment: Earth story. I do want to make a story like that too: a historical companion book to a television show that never existed. It could be Jorge Borges by way of D. C. Fontana.

But I thought I’d spin a few moral philosophical reflections about the Doctor Who 50th, seeing as that pretty much dominated my afternoon and evening.* Because this is fundamentally a story about the nature of conscience. Incidentally, I’ll take this footnote break to broadcast an enormous 

SPOILERS

to anyone who hasn’t watched The Day of the Doctor yet and still wants to be surprised.

* I also watched the drama, Adventures in Space and Time, Mark Gatiss’ tv-movie of the birth of Doctor Who and over William Hartnell’s era, and I think the last two minutes actively constitute fanfic on BBC2 and the international broadcast partners. I’m not sure if that’s good, or if it’s absolutely terrifying. I shall have to think further on this.

Whenever I've looked into philosophical
articles or seen presentations on the
morality of conscience, all the
discussions end up becoming
commentaries on Kant's conception
of conscience. While he was a brilliant
innovator of this kind of moral
philosophy, we shouldn't return to him
as if he said all that could have been
said. We need to escape our ancestors
sometime.

You see, the whole story is built around John Hurt’s use of The Moment, a weapon whose computer was so powerful that it developed a conscience. And any weapon — any killing machine — with a conscience is going to prevent itself from being used. Really, The Moment’s conscience is so extreme that it calls for philosophical analysis. There’s a powerful purity to the conscience that Steven Moffat wrote.

In the material sense, The Moment prevented itself from being used by connecting John Hurt, the one who wanted to use it, to the future versions of himself who would prevent him from using it. But these future versions would also do double duty of showing the full ethical consequences of his actions: what kind of person he would become if he were to use the weapon. And he was, in many ways, a haunted man. David Tennant’s Doctor is defined by his regrets; there’s a reason why one of his catchphrases was “I’m so, so sorry.” Matt Smith’s Doctor is defined by his flightiness, his forgetfulness, how he flits from one topic to another in a manic squeal to cover up the rage. This is precisely what Moffat intends us to think: he has Billie Piper’s Moment avatar explicitly say it. 

Hearing Hurt’s rage as they sit in the Elizabethan cell, Smith chuckles that this is how he sounds when he’s alone. Smith hides his self-hatred.** Seeing his same old heroism shine through the trauma, and the impact that trauma makes on his future selves, Hurt returns to Gallifrey knowing that, no matter what he does to himself, he doesn’t become a monster permanently.

** I think this is why I’m glad Christopher Eccleston was being paid far too much money to leave the set of Thor II. His Doctor, wonderful though he was, had so short a tenure that his character was defined too much by the raw trauma of the Time War and his destruction of Gallifrey. It’s why I’m still conflicted about Eccleston’s Doctor, why I’m sad we never had more than a single year to explore his character. The Time War weighed too heavily on him, and we never got to see him truly deal with it, only scream with the pain. At no point in the Eccleston Doctor’s life would he have been able to do anything but rage uncontrollably at John Hurt. The story would have to be utterly different.

Because what Hurt wants to do is monstrous. That’s why he doesn’t think of himself as the Doctor, why he accepts his punishments that The Moment gives him during their initial talk. Her own sense of conscience is so pure that even the intention to use the weapon for any reason is worthy of punishment. Hurt realizes, with Tennant and Smith beside him, that there is another way. 

Only when he was alone did Hurt have no choice but to use The Moment as a weapon, losing the privilege of being called The Doctor. When he has himself as a companion, he can become better than his worst defeats. The Moment avatar acts as a companion to Hurt, serving as a voice of pure conscience, the faith that he can be better than his circumstances dictate. Clara does the same for Smith, calling him away from activating the weapon and reminding him that he can find another way out, the ethically best way out of an impossible situation. Clara, The Moment Avatar, the companion, is the call of conscience for the Doctor, the conscience that sanctions him to pull himself out of the narrative whose structure and associated necessity bind us completely, and cheat.***

*** The Moment acts as a pure conscience, which is often described as an internal voice. Yes, Kant described it this way. He was influential for a reason, after all. One can understand that voice as whispering, “There should have been another way.” The three Doctors gathering at The Moment’s moment of activation even describe that event as immune to conscience’s intervention, the day there was no other way. It would make sense that Moffat would choose The Moment’s avatar as Rose Tyler’s Bad Wolf, the literal goddess from the machine, the TARDIS, who ethically renewed Eccleston’s Doctor by ending The Parting of the Ways without further loss of innocent life. She cheated the story for the Doctor, when Eccleston couldn’t think of how, demonstrating that there was another way. Bad Wolf Rose was a voice of pure conscience that could act on her will, just like The Moment.

Because the explanation is pure technobabble, just like the more obvious technobabble of Russell T. Davies’ cheats that win his epic stories. The real story of The Day of the Doctor is about watching the ethical transformation, the redemption of John Hurt, and through him, the redemption of the character. He is now primed to truly run forever.

You see, I think the Doctor has had a problem since its revival. Materially, it’s become bigger than it’s ever been before. Never in the wildest dreams of anyone before the international export and promotional blitz that has occurred during the Moffat era, has Doctor Who ever been this big, when The Day of the Doctor is simulcast literally across the world. The Wikipedia page for the special has a map of how many countries picked up the simulcast. There are more who did than didn’t. On Earth. That’s how big we are.

But the Time War and the trauma it inflicted on the character of the Doctor is a weight around the show that wouldn’t go away. There’s a reason Smith’s Doctor is called the one who forgets: it’s been so long since the Time War continuity was introduced, Moffat knew it would get in the way constantly having to wax on about it, as we could in the Tennant years. Because the Davies era formed a single continuous storyline of overlapping characters (except for the one little gap just before his regeneration where, in-canon, Tennant’s Doctor comes for the 50th Anniversary), from Time War’s end to Tennant’s goodbye was a fairly short time. 

Smith’s Doctor lives for centuries longer: he’s had long stretches travelling by himself, there are many gaps in the timeline of his main friendships, his entire life with River Song**** was off-camera, and he pops in and out of Clara’s life as she continues to live individually, disappearing with The Doctor for periodic adventures. But the trauma was still there, even after nearly ten years from the show’s revival and the introduction of the Time War continuity (let alone the centuries of in-canon life Smith lives). The destruction of Gallifrey, the one moment The Doctor became literally just as monstrous as what he fights, would always determine the character. 

**** Of course, when Tennant asks how Smith could let himself forget the details of the trauma of activating The Moment, he says, “Spoilers.” It was the love of his relationship with River that helped him process and move on from his own trauma. That’s why he was so depressed and isolated in The Snowmen. It wasn’t just Amy and Rory who were gone; it was the Ponds. All three of them. Between Angels Take Manhattan and The Snowmen, River went to The Library and died.

That trauma would be the one constant in the Doctor, a source of terrible gravity dragging down his character. Smith and Moffat (in the current creative process of Doctor Who, they’re the joint designers of the Eleventh Doctor, just as Tennant and Davies were for the Tenth) could find a new take on the trauma after Eccleston, Tennant, and Davies. Peter Capaldi might have managed it too.

But what about the Doctor after Capaldi? And the one after that? And after that? The weight would grow. The character would become inflexible. The show would no longer be about anything and everything, but about the inescapable trauma of being single-handedly responsible for the murder of billions. It wouldn’t be Doctor Who anymore. The weight would become so much that it could not go on.

My esteemed colleague Phil Sandifer has described the Time War as the cancellation of Doctor Who itself, appearing in the context of Doctor Who’s own continuity, the scar on the history of the show. It makes a permanent break in the nature of the classic series from the revived series. Just as Doctor Who lives with the trauma of cancellation, The Doctor lives with the trauma of the one day he became a monster. Phil tweeted on Anniversary night that now The Gallifrey Chronicles was closer to the nature of the Time War than Dalek was. The Gallifrey Chronicles implied a hopeful ending to a similar arc about The Eighth Doctor having destroyed Gallifrey in the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel series (1997-2005). However amazing Dalek and the Eccleston year was, it only offered us Doctor Who with the burden of a terrible scar.

With The Day of the Doctor, Moffat has healed that scar, yet given us a storyline that preserved continuity with the scarred history of the revived series of 2005-13. The trauma of having believed he destroyed Gallifrey and its billions of citizens was The Moment’s pure conscience punishing him for even planning to carry out so hideous an act, wiping the memory of saving Gallifrey during his regeneration from Hurt into Eccleston. That’s the moral story of The Day of the Doctor, depicting a conscience so pure that it punishes for monstrous intents and pushes those who intended to use monstrous weapons away from actually using them.

But The Day of the Doctor also depicts Doctor Who as a television show reconciling itself with its past, understanding and accepting its own unity despite the fracture that means a show with a fifty year history has only thirty-four years worth of transmitted television. That’s why it was necessary simply for us to have hope that the atrocity of the Time War, the cancellation, the destruction of Gallifrey, can be healed. 

We needed Tom Baker to do it. A literal voice from the classic series, its most recognizable living icon, first appearing by his most distinctive feature, his voice. Because Tom Baker, as he appears in The Day of the Doctor, isn’t simply a museum curator. He isn’t some technobabbly echo of the Doctor’s past futurity, or whatever. We know from understanding the basic structure of Davies’ and Moffat’s styles of Doctor Who that the technobabble details don’t matter in the structure of the story. The ethics matter.

Tom Baker is clearly playing the Doctor. He isn’t imitating the Fourth Doctor. He is literally playing the Doctor, as he approaches the character. He is simply doing it at the age of 79. He is the classic series appearing in the new and saying explicitly that he and Smith are the same. The trauma of destroying Gallifrey, the trauma of the cancellation, made the classic series different from the post-2005 Doctor Who. The character was different because each actor playing him since 2005 has had to incorporate this one day of monstrosity into his take on the character. Hurt didn’t even have to, because his character hadn't yet done his one irredeemably monstrous act. That’s why, as Clara told him, he looked so young, even though John Hurt is 73 years old.

Knowing that Gallifrey has been saved from the destruction of the Time War and that the lives of billions are no longer on his hands, the Doctor has been ethically redeemed. Now that Smith remembers having saved Gallifrey, he is free from the guilt of his monstrous crime. Having to live with what is impossible to live with for centuries was The Moment’s punishment for having intended to do what would be impossible to live with. From now on, the writers and actors who create Doctor Who for the next fifty years will be free, because the character of The Doctor is free from the trauma. He knows he was never a monster at all; he was only the Doctor.

Tom Baker delivered the message because the break in the history of the show is healed. Because Steven Moffat’s international promotional blitz wasn’t only about pushing the new series. All that promotion treated the entire history of Doctor Who as a unified whole, a cultural tradition that was now being spread around the world with more power than ever before. If we take Phil at his word that the Time War was the trauma of the cancellation made manifest in Doctor Who’s continuity, we now have healed that trauma. And we now have a show that has run for fifty years across television, film, novels, comics, radio, video games, and audio plays. 

Tom Baker, once the living embodiment of Doctor Who itself, could reach across to the incumbent and declare with a song of hope in his remarkable voice, that they are the same. They are the Doctor in one mad fifty year story. No cancellation in the future will ever be quite as terrible, as raw, as hopeless as 1989-2005. Because now we know it can return. When it eventually goes away again, we know it can always come back. 

Doctor Who is back.